I'm trying to generate a report listing all the instances of feathers in a set of drawings, similar to the cables reports, but seem to be stuck.  Given that Feathers are symbols, I looked for a symbols dataset (which, come to think of it, could be useful as both Feathers and J-STD-710 symbols have assignable attributes, but couldn't find any way to access these.  Help?

Hi Jesse,

Fields relating to Feathers are exposed in the Cables dataset, e.g. Feather ID.  We assume that Feathers are intrinsically linked to Cables which is why their data fields appear only in the Cables and CableInstances datasets; you can't have a Feather without an associated Cable.

We do not expose Symbols as datasets per se because Symbols are just graphical representations of something 'higher' in the Project hierarchy e.g. a Product. 

Can you describe exactly what fields you wish to use in reports?  Perhaps you could email your project file and a list of the fields you wish to use to techsupport@stardraw.com so that we can fully understand the data you're working with and your ultimate objective. 

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

+x

 

Rob Robinson - 7/10/2025 10:03:49 PM

Hi Jesse,

Fields relating to Feathers are exposed in the Cables dataset, e.g. Feather ID.  We assume that Feathers are intrinsically linked to Cables which is why their data fields appear only in the Cables and CableInstances datasets; you can't have a Feather without an associated Cable.

We do not expose Symbols as datasets per se because Symbols are just graphical representations of something 'higher' in the Project hierarchy e.g. a Product. 

Can you describe exactly what fields you wish to use in reports?  Perhaps you could email your project file and a list of the fields you wish to use to techsupport@stardraw.com so that we can fully understand the data you're working with and your ultimate objective. 

Thanks so much - it isn't canonical, and a friend who is a maintainer for the National CAD Standard is probably shuddering as I mention this, but we will often use non-paired feathers on network connections.  In our application, this can be quite complex - typically there are two but there may be as many as 3-4 LANs on only given system depending on security and other considerations.  Pulling the list at the end makes my port count easier, and since we often assign IP Addresses with CIDR notation to the attached cables having this here works well.  The only gripe is that I can only see the Feather ID, not the Feather Label, but this is easy enough to fix in the future....

Hi Jesse,

Without seeing your project or the exact nature of the report you want to generate it's hard to suggest the best approach but one option might be to create a User Defined Product (UDP) for the LAN connection 'feather' (really, just an identifier) which could include a Text Attribute for identification on the drawing and which would also return that Attribute value for the purposes of reporting. This would give you the flexibility to have any Attribute name(s) you want and it/they would be exposed in the Products and Cables datasets for your reports.

For more on Text Attributes, see the movie "Text Attributes", #17 at https://www.stardraw.com/sd7/movies

Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

+x

 

Rob Robinson - 7/11/2025 5:20:22 PM

Hi Jesse,

Without seeing your project or the exact nature of the report you want to generate it's hard to suggest the best approach but one option might be to create a User Defined Product (UDP) for the LAN connection 'feather' (really, just an identifier) which could include a Text Attribute for identification on the drawing and which would also return that Attribute value for the purposes of reporting. This would give you the flexibility to have any Attribute name(s) you want and it/they would be exposed in the Products and Cables datasets for your reports.

For more on Text Attributes, see the movie "Text Attributes", #17 at https://www.stardraw.com/sd7/movies

Thanks - I'll put a pin in this for the moment and reach out again with an example when it comes up.  I'm still in the SD phase for the project I was asking about, but I'm expected to be in SD by August....